More electronic fun – with Sparkfun

Remember Heathkit? Well, they are still around but they concentrate on the educational market now. What made Heathkit an icon in that market was their motto “we won’t let you fail.” A motto they lived up to through a really caring and conscientious customer service approach . Selling kits for everything from radios to Robots, Heathkit empowered builders all over the world to better understand the devices around them.

There are a lot of kit companies around these days but very few that offer the kind of flexibility, creativity and excitement we and our children crave. And very few make learning any fun. You may still learn something from building a radio kit, but mostly it will be on your own. What’s missing is the “not being alone” part of kit building, the “here’s how to do it, step by step” and “Why it does what it does.”

Enter Sparkfun

Heathkit had a big, concerned, involved customer service department, something that’s hard to bankroll these days. But along comes a relatively new company with an exceptionally wide and varied product line and new ideas about how to support their customers. Sparkfun is a company that had some new moves to make building almost anything electronic fun and very satisfying.

The Sparkfun Starter kit for Arduino

First, they base their product line around prebuilt and prewired computers on PC boards called “controllers. They come ready to go, just power them up and you’re rockin’. The controllers take a lot of the complexity out of traditional electronic kits and bring a huge potential for creating something unique and personal. Second, they have fostered a gigantic user community of like-minded individuals who love to experiment and help each other. Besides the library of tutorials on the Sparkfun site, there are hundreds of customer created YouTube videos of Sparkfun projects. New “How to’s,” “Look at what I made,” and “Try this’s” come out every day. It’s the kind of support most of us can only dream of. Third, Sparkfun is fanatically coming out with new products and ideas all the time. They scour the electronics world for cool and useful chips and devices and then work to make them easier to use. They are dedicated to making their customers a success in electronics.

It is a huge advantage to start with a controller for a project you want to build. These devices are programable computers that only require power, a hook up to a computer and connections to whatever devices you want them to run. That can be everything from mutli-band radios to cell phone cameras to WiFi controlled lights. Serious projects that are fun and easy to build. As they say on their site “Whether it’s a robot that can cook your breakfast or a GPS cat tracking device, our products and resources are designed to make the world of electronics more accessible to the average person.”

The real Sparkfun advantage is that they empower their customers to not only create projects others have, but to come up with their own as well. It doesn’t take very long to get going on a project, nor does it cost a fortune. Controllers start at about $19 for one of the smallest Arduino controllers and a full experimental start up sensor kit with a controller goes for about $60. That’s everything you need for days and days of fun and experimentation for only $60 bucks. What a present that would make.

Build your own video game console, it fits in a pocket.

It’s important that as our world becomes more and more automated and programmed that our kids (and the rest of us) have resources to help understand how it all works. Sparkfun’s kits and products are not toys essentially, they are the real thing. They use the same parts that go into real everyday products, like a Flex sensor from a Nintendo power glove or the camera module from a cell phone. It’s the preparation and support of a good company and large community that makes all of the products Sparkfun offers so accessible.

As a gift or a little something for yourself, Sparkfun is really worth checking out.

Prentiss Gray is a writer and stay at home Dad with 27 years in the information systems and technology business. His favorite saying is “If you have to read the manual to use it, I don’t want one.” He can be reached via his website www.prentissgray.com. More of his work can be seen on Speak Without Interruption.

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About Prentiss Gray

Prentiss Gray is a writer and stay at home Dad with 27 years in the information systems and technology business. After the death of his first wife, he decided to stay home and care for his three sons. During that time he discovered that his life long passion for technology had new worlds to explore. Lurking throughout his home, fascinating technologies were just waiting to be investigated.
Little by little, he began to crack the enigmas of washing machines and vacuums. He worked diligently to break the secret codes of wireless telephones and kitchen faucets and fought to understand why toasters and rice makers needed chips more advanced than those that flew on the Apollo moon missions.
The ongoing battle is endless, but he has developed a new attitude toward domestic technology. To clear out the complicated, to shun the needless effort necessary to deal with devices and products that do not serve their owners as much as confuse and frustrate them. In short, to seek out the domestic products that are have excellent quality, a reasonable price and are truly intuitive to use. His new battle cry is “If you have to read the manual to use it, I don’t want one.”

About this Blog

Everything from coffee makers to Internet surfing smart phones, it’s all about the every day technology which we use, and get confused by, every day. This is the place to get what you need to know about the latest trends as well as things that have puzzled you in the past. Recommend a product, ask a question, suggest a column, We’re here you help you understand the technology of everyday life!